Yes, that's not going to change as a lot more is done while importing, especially making a hash for the file. Hopefully this one imports well for you. Several complete imports have been done during testing with 5000+ songs and there were no problems.

New Beta. This is the first Beta that's been labeled as finished, meaning that it could be released in the next week. The ReadMe has been updated and hopefully after a week of testing and tweaking JukeBx 1.4 will be complete.

Some time ago the hard disk drive failed in my CarPC. So I have upgraded from HDD to SSD(solid state disk), by the way moved from WinXP to Win7.

Ahh! To be honest I was starting to think that you got sick of my release delays! On that subject this version has been working wonderful for me; even on some quite abusive testing I've had only one (non-repeatable) crash over the past few months so I'm very happy with this release.

muzzy wrote:I have installed JukeBx 1.401 and it imported fine about 800 songs. And now it successfully prepares 100 songs but it do not play them. JukeBx is just skipping the songs one by one

That's odd; it should work with Windows 7, but there are several versions and I've only used the standard one. But yes, it will do that if the file is unplayable.

muzzy wrote:As far as i understand JukeBx is using external codec. May be the problem is that my freshly installed windows 7 has no compatible audio codec?

If it is which one do you recommend to install?

JukeBx uses the MCI interface, which will then use the default codecs, so yes it's external. (I plan to change this to DirectX soon.) While I wouldn't go so far as to say I recommend them, I use K-Lite Codec Pack. I do have some minor issues with that so I also use the (codec-less) VideoLAN for other stuff... but that's beside the point.

muzzy wrote:All these 800 songs were converted from FLAC to MP3(320 kbps bitrate) using Foobar2000. May be that is the reason?

Well I'm no expert on Foobar2000, but I believe it internally uses the LAME encoder to make MP3s, much like many others. I've been having trouble playing things encoded with the newer versons myself, but 3.96 used to work. You can get that here.

muzzy wrote:What software do you use to convert music to MP3 (and what bitrate do you use)?

Lately Windows Media Player, and I've been using 320 for years. I am planning to go for pure wave files soon...

Siegfried wrote:Well I'm no expert on Foobar2000, but I believe it internally uses the LAME encoder to make MP3s, much like many others. I've been having trouble playing things encoded with the newer versons myself, but 3.96 used to work. You can get that here.

Yes, foobar2000 requires lame.exe in its folder. I was using version 3.98.2

muzzy wrote:I have tried lame 3.96 but with the same result - the songs are still skipping one by one.

Odd. Odd. Odd. Sorry.

Well I tested your files, and sure enough they don't work. Looking at them it was easy to find out why; they were LAME3.96a and my tested ones were LAME3.96r. To avoid wasting both our time any further I decided to do some tests and I encoded some files and I can say that as tested by me using about 50 files this version...

...works. I used the RazerLame interface while doing the tests and set to 128 kbit and 320 kbit, and with and without VBR. I had zero problems. According the RazerLame the command line to replacate this is;

-b 320 -m j -h -V 4 -B 320

The LAME396 that I linked to worked just a well for me so I have no idea what's going on there. In the next few days I'll download some more versions and I'll post my results.

I think that there are some strange problem with JukeBx When I have imported 800 songs (including 3 tracks posted above, all converted with foobar2000+lame at one time with the same settings) to an empty JukeBx database - no one was playing, but just skipping one by one.

After that I have added some other songs (they were downloaded from the internet) to the same database. And then my songs started to play (including those 1.mp3, 2.mp3 and 3.mp3)...

Sorry to argue, and you may not believe me, but I don't think this is the case. Why? JukeBx does very little in regard to the actual playing. It just passes the file name to a MCI control and monitors it. When it hasn't been advancing for a set time it's seen as finished and plays the next one. When I first saw this problem I blamed JukeBx too, so I disabled the monitoring, but it made no difference.

For some reason the interface between MCI and the player codec has problems with some versions of LAME. It isn't the codec itself as other players have no problems with the same files. I think it's just that MCI is inadequate to use today. I have avoided using Direct-X as it will cause compatibility issues on older computers, but at this stage it seems the best solution to this issue.

I can't explain why the files started playing, but I will say this. I run JukeBx on about 5 computers, and only one shows no sign of this problem. It's a computer running Win2K that is used as a JukeBox running the latest version of JukeBx. (It's in my lounge room.) I've never upgraded the codecs since it was first installed about 5 years ago and I've spent a lot of time trying to replicate the setup with no success. But I can say with 99% certainty that this issue is not caused by JukeBx itself.

Sorry but i did not received the new code. I have sent you my email that i used for registration in private message.Please send it again. Thanks!

My MP3s were encoded with Foobar2000 + LAME 3.96.1 that you recommended. I was using foobar because most of my music are in FLAC format and LAME itself don't understand flac files. Also i used foobar to resample music to the same volume level (ReplayGain)

Today i have tried dbPoweramp+Lame and dbPoweramp+Helix and did not find any dependences. Most mp3s it produced are skipped by JukeBx but some are played fine...

But GOOD NEWS are that JukeBx is playing WMA and even WMA lossless!!!Except that artist and title are not displayed. But I can create correct folder structure: artist/album/title.WMA and it displayed correctly!

Indeed. That one is odd as much of the functions use that; it must be a minor bug.

muzzy wrote:But GOOD NEWS are that JukeBx is playing WMA and even WMA lossless!!!Except that artist and title are not displayed. But I can create correct folder structure: artist/album/title.WMA and it displayed correctly!

So I am moving to WMA!

To my embarrassment I never thought to suggest that. To my further embarrassment I forgot that there even was a WMA Lossless format. I might give that a go myself; I've been planning a move to WAV format but WMA Lossless would be smarter in the sort term considering it has native OS support as well.

muzzy wrote:NewDB button in Database window doesn't work on first click. Only works on second click...

Not for me; even when it was doing background work it worked first time. It did take about a second to respond though.

muzzy wrote:After that 100 prepared tracks played - new list is not builded...

Are you waiting for it to finish importing first? While it allows you to close the window, the ReadMe does say;

Then press "Import" and wait for JukeBx to finish.

Importing is an intensive job and unless you're only adding a song or two it's best to do it when it's not playing or building. I did some tests with over 6000 songs and they imported correctly when doing it this way. In regard to the JukeBx not working correctly with a small DB, this is probably true; many functions (such as history) are designed to work with larger song numbers and don't make much sense otherwise.

muzzy wrote:Another example of non-building-playlist condition:I have DB containing 493 songs. Playlist is starting to build. I am pressing PLAY when it builded 13 tracks - this leads JukeBx to stop building....

Yes, this is a feature! The building should resume a bit later; it does this for responsiveness reasons.

muzzy wrote:Very often PLAY/PAUSE and NEXT buttons stop responding or are responding with a delay...

Yes, this probably is true. You feel the delay is too long? Depending on settings pressing pause will trigger a build as it assumes that this is a good time for it. It then switches to a less responsive UI mode so it's less of a system burden. When you press pause it has to do the reverse. As for NEXT this can be true as well for similar reasons.

You might find it hard to believe but I run JukeBx on 4+ computers every day! One is set up as a stereo and it works flawlessly even without the screen being on; I just turn it on and it starts, and I press "p" when I've finished. But something seems to not be working so smoothly for you! I'll do further tests. (I've already fixed the "ClearList", but I'll upload it when I've done further tweaks.) Thanks for your feedback; hopefully you'll be as happy with JukeBx as me soon...